The luckiest guy in TOS

Lol - if it's good enough to appear in Scary Movie, it's good enough to appear on these boards. I do think that the scene was very, very deliberate. They wanted to toy with the expectations of the time and they succeeded. If Grace Lee Whitney had still been playing Rand, what a fabulous and shocking end that would have given her character.

A Star Trek: The Next Generation example - in "Where Silence Has Lease" an alien face on the viewscreen says that he wants to understand death by way of killing about half the crew and starts by killing the pilot, the spot normally manned by Wesley Crusher. But he's away from the post at the time, the only time in the whole episode, replaced by a Red Shirt black guy.

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OMFG, yeah! This was so embarrassing when that episode aired.

In an alternate timeline of Star Trek: Enterprise wherein the Xindi are successful in their genocidal bid to eradicate humanity, Travis Mayweather is the first of the main characters to die.

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Poor Travis!

An aversion: Early in the Star Trek episode “By Any Other Name”, the alien Kelvans reduce two Red Shirts to blocks: Lieutenant Shea, a black guy, and Yeoman Thompson, a woman. The Kelvan leader crushes one block, killing that crewmember, and restores the other block; Thompson’s the dead one, and Shea is restored to normal.

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And wouldn't you know it? The article discusses By Any Other Name, basically as if it rubs up against the trope.

The scene was going for emotional impact. If you want emotional impact when the bad guy kills someone, have him kill a beautiful young woman or a cute child. Not some random smuck. That's why he lived and she died, color had nothing to do with it.

It might be interesting for someone to come up with a statistic like for baseball. Number of screen deaths per x number of appearances and compare black and white actors with otherwise similar demographics.

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Why should "someone" come up with these stats? Because you have some particular axe to grind? We're supposedly living in an enlightened world were sex and race don't matter. Yet I repeatedly see proclamations of "first woman this", "first black that", "first latino whatever." Now tell me who is racist and sexist here? Give people more credit for their personal achievements than some arbitrary and politically correct pigeonhole.

It might be interesting for someone to come up with a statistic like for baseball. Number of screen deaths per x number of appearances and compare black and white actors with otherwise similar demographics.

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Why should "someone" come up with these stats? Because you have some particular axe to grind? We're supposedly living in an enlightened world were sex and race don't matter. Yet I repeatedly see proclamations of "first woman this", "first black that", "first latino whatever." Now tell me who is racist and sexist here? Give people more credit for their personal achievements than some arbitrary and politically correct pigeonhole.

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Outstanding!

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Merely collecting historical data of television programs isn't "racist" or "sexist". There's no implication of approval in studying the way things were.

Historians collect all kinds of data. Would you accuse people who study the progress of civil rights of being either racist or sexist? That's absurd.

On the other hand, people who distort or suppress history would seem to have axes to grind.

I read you as trying to tar anybody who would collect stats on ethnicity and sex in television as having an ax to grind. The purpose of my remarks was to refute that notion. Perhaps your beef is just with the OP?